High Performance Computing for Mathematical Optimization Problem

The semidefinite programming (SDP) problem is one of the central problems in mathematical optimization. The primal-dual interior-point method (PDIPM) is one of the most powerful algorithms for solving SDP problems, and many research groups have employed it for developing software packages. However, two well-known major bottlenecks, i.e., the generation of the Schur complement matrix (SCM) and its Cholesky factorization, exist in the algorithmic framework of the PDIPM. We have developed a new version of the semidefinite programming algorithm parallel version (SDPARA), which is a parallel implementation on multiple CPUs and GPUs for solving extremely large-scale SDP problems with over a million constraints. SDPARA can automatically extract the unique characteristics from an SDP problem and identify the bottleneck. When the generation of the SCM becomes a bottleneck, SDPARA can attain high scalability using a large quantity of CPU cores and some processor affinity and memory interleaving techniques. SDPARA can also perform parallel Cholesky factorization using thousands of GPUs and techniques for overlapping computation and communication if an SDP problem has over 2 million constraints and Cholesky factorization constitutes a bottleneck. We demonstrate that SDPARA is a high-performance general solver for SDPs in various application fields through numerical experiments conducted on the TSUBAME 2.5 supercomputer, and we solved the largest SDP problem (which has over 2.33 million constraints), thereby creating a new world record. Our implementation also achieved 1.713 PFlops in double precision for large-scale Cholesky factorization using 2,720 CPUs and 4,080 GPUs.